A Torch Kept Lit Read online

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  The Reagan years accustomed us to a mood about life and about government. There were always the interruptions, the potholes of life. But Ronald Reagan had strategic visions. He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government.

  That, of course, is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise. On the other hand, it is only a government leader who can critically affect a national mood or put his stamp on a historical period. One refers not to the period of Shakespeare, but to the period of Elizabeth. Reagan’s period was brief, but he did indeed put his stamp on it. He did this in part because he was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, in part because he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.

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  It is fine that the Ronald Reagan Library, Museum, and Center for Public Affairs, which serves as our host, will collect his papers and ambient literature, permitting generations of students and scholars to explore and linger over those happy years which augured the end of the Soviet threat, the revitalization of our economy, and a great draft of pride in our country. To the library I’ll convey in years ahead my own collection of letters from Ronald Reagan. The very last one written from the White House, the day the Soviet Union announced that it would withdraw from Afghanistan, began:

  Dear Mr. Ambassador:

  Congratulations!

  The Soviets are moving out of Afghanistan. I knew you could do it if I only left you there long enough, and you did it without leaving Kabul for a minute.

  He closed by saying, “Nancy sends her love to you and Pat.”

  That was eleven years ago, and we cherish it today, and through her, convey our own love and gratitude to the President, on his 88th birthday.

  “I’m just a simple country girl from the woods of British Columbia,” Pat Buckley liked to say, but everyone who knew la grande dame knew how given she was to untruths—the more outrageous and amusing, the better. As WFB’s wife of fifty-seven years, Pat was every inch the equal of her famous husband and essential, in her way, to his engagement with presidents and intellectuals. “Pat looks like a queen, acts like a queen, and is just the match for Billy,” WFB’s sister Trish Buckley wrote home in 1948. Trish’s Vassar suite mate, Patricia Aldyen Austin Taylor, a debutante from one of Canada’s wealthiest families, sported a fabulous figure, nearly six feet tall, her fine features framed by lustrous brown hair. “She came into Buckley’s room with a mink coat on,” remembered Francis Donahue, faculty adviser to the Yale Daily News, “and she just let it fall off her shoulders onto the floor. All the students were in love with her.” “She didn’t enter a room,” agreed Schuyler Chapin, the Metropolitan Opera executive, “she took possession of it.” Over the July Fourth weekend in 1949, seventy-two hours into their first extended time together, Bill resolved to propose. The setting was Shannon, the Taylor home in Vancouver: an enclave of English gardens surrounding a Georgian mansion. Bill asked Pat’s sister, Kathleen, to fetch her from a canasta game. Told her new boyfriend wanted to see her and was acting strangely, Pat set down her cards and strode to the library. There she found Bill pacing and smoking. “Bill, what do you want?”

  “Patricia, would you consider marriage with me?”

  “Bill,” she replied, “I’ve been asked this question many times. To the others I’ve said no. To you I say yes. Now may I please get back and finish my hand?”

  Over the next six decades—in locales as far-flung as New Haven, Mexico City, Manhattan, Stamford, and Gstaad—Pat provided ballast to WFB’s frenetic life, most significantly in the gift of their one “miracle” child, Christopher Taylor Buckley, in September 1952. A pair of ectopic pregnancies surrounding Christopher’s birth precluded any more children, let alone the kind of extended family Bill had cherished as a child. “It was a terrible blow,” Bill said. As Christopher matured, and with WFB frequently traveling, Pat threw herself into philanthropy. Her prime beneficiaries were the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. For the last, Pat helped raise an estimated $75 million over thirty years.

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  In all they did together and much of what Bill did on his own, Pat tirelessly supported her husband. Where this loyalty was most severely tested was in Bill’s love of sailing. Eulogizing his father, Christopher Buckley said: “Some of my earliest memories are of my mother, shrieking at him as the water broke over the cockpit and the boat pitched furiously in boiling seas, ‘Bill—Bill! Why are you trying to kill us?’ ”

  As in any marriage, there was strain; Christopher’s Losing Mum and Pup (2009) recorded that Pat and Bill, who addressed each other as “Ducky,” quarreled so frequently as to have been on nonspeaking terms for “about a third” of their marriage. No one else could more swiftly defenestrate WFB, chop the champion debater down to size, with a tart one-liner—or a look. “The wrath of Pat Buckley,” Christopher wrote, “could instill fear in an advancing column of mechanized infantry.” No less outsized a figure than Henry Kissinger recalled Pat’s “rather overpowering personality,” remembering that she exhibited “no hesitancy in interrupting me in midparagraph, saying, ‘You’re making no sense at all.’ ” When Pat’s acerbic wit or penchant for The Whopper created awkward moments—usually, Christopher noted, “after the supernumerary glass of wine”—the famously articulate WFB would freeze into an expression “somewhere between a Jack Benny stare and the stoic grimace of a thirteenth-century saint being burned alive at the stake.” At times, of course, WFB gave it right back. The British filmmaker Peter Glenville remembered an occasion when Pat, still seething from a spat, admonished Bill not to address her as Ducky. “Oh, why not?”

  “I’m not going to go into it. Just don’t call me Ducky.”

  “Then what would you like me to call you?” Bill asked. “Shitface?”

  All of it—the full Buckley complement of fame and intellectual engagement, high society and haute couture, adventures literary, snowy, and nautical, the grand style that helped make WFB so persuasive in the controversial arts—was made possible by Pat: She captained the ship of their lives. As Christopher, supreme witness to the Buckley marriage, observed, “Deep in her DNA was something that I think she had learned from her mother: you take care of your men.” Pat Buckley’s own summation of her life was as reliable, perhaps, as the description of her as a simple country girl. “I’m just an Arab wife,” she said. “When Bill says, ‘Strike the tent,’ I do.”

  “Patricia Taylor Buckley, R.I.P.”

  National Review, May 14, 2007.

  [Christopher’s memoir notes that both he and WFB prepared eulogies for Pat’s funeral but “neither Pup nor I trusted ourselves to get through a eulogy.” Bill wrote the foregoing for the program, then published it in NR; Christopher’s tribute became the service, an ornate and beautifully executed affair at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur.]

  By any standard, at near six feet tall, she was extraordinary. She shared a suite with my sister Trish and two other students at Vassar, and on that spring evening in 1949 I was the blind date she had never met. When I walked into the drawing room the four girls shared, I found her hard pressed. She was mostly ready for the prom but was now vexed by attendant responsibilities. I offered to paint her fingernails, and she immediately extended her hand, using the other one on the telephone. The day before, she had given the sad news to her roommates that she would not be returning to Vassar for junior and senior years. She was needed at home, in Vancouver, to help her mother care for a dying family member. My own parents had gone to their place in South Carolina for the winter and the house in Sharon, Conn., was closed. But I would dart over from Yale for an occasional weekend in the huge empty house, and Trish brought her there once, and we laughed all weekend long, and Trish promised to visit her in Vancouver during the summer.

  I had a su
mmer job in Calgary working for my father in the oil business, and from there happily flew over to Vancouver to join Trish and Pat for a weekend. Her father’s vast house occupied an entire city block, but did not dampen our spirits. On the contrary, the tempo of our congeniality heightened, and on the third day I asked if she would marry me. She rushed upstairs to tell her mother, and I waited at the bottom of the huge staircase hoping to get the temper of her proud mother’s reaction (her father was out of town), and soon I heard peals of laughter. I waited apprehensively for Pat to advise me what that was all about. The laughter, she revealed, was generated by her mother’s taking the occasion to recall that eight times in the past, Pat had reported her betrothal.

  One year later, in the company of about a thousand guests, we exchanged vows. Two months after that, we rented a modest house in a suburb of New Haven. Pat resolved to learn how to cook. Her taste was advanced and her ambitions exigent, so she commuted to New York City and learned cooking from experts, becoming one herself. Meanwhile, I taught a class in Spanish to undergraduates and wrote God and Man at Yale.

  Primarily to avoid exposure to further duty as an infantry officer, I joined the CIA and we went to live in Mexico City, buying and decorating a lovely house in the district of San Angel Inn. Pat was radiant and hyperactive in maintaining the house and its little garden. She resolutely failed to learn the language, even though, until the end, the staff was Spanish-speaking, but intercommunication was electrically effective.

  Her solicitude was such that she opposed any venture by me which she thought might adversely affect me. She opposed the founding of National Review, my signing up with a lecture agency, my nonfiction books and then my fiction books, my contract to write a syndicated column, the projected winter in Switzerland, my decision to run for mayor of New York. Yet once these enterprises were undertaken, she participated enthusiastically. It was she who located the exquisite house, every inch of which she decorated, that we shared for 55 years. We had only one child, Christopher, of whom she was understandably proud. And it was she—all but uniquely she—who brought to this house the legion of guests, of all ages, professions, and interests, whose company made up her lively life.

  Her infirmities dated back to a skiing accident in 1965. She went through four hip replacements over the years. She went into the hospital a fortnight ago, but there was no thought of any terminal problem. Yet following an infection, on the seventh day, she died, in the arms of her son.

  Friends from everywhere were quick to record their grief. One of them was especially expressive. “Allow a mere acquaintance of your wife to sense the magnitude of your loss. As surely as she physically towered over her surroundings, she must have mentally, spiritually, and luminously surpassed ordinary mortals. She certainly was in every sense of the term une grande dame, a distinction she wore as lightly as a T-shirt—not that one can imagine her in anything so plebeian. The only consolation one may offer is that the greatness of a loss is the measure of its antecedent gain. And perhaps also that Pat’s memory will be second only to her presence. For as long as you live, people will share with you happy reminiscences that, in their profusion, you may have forgotten or not even known.

  “I am a confirmed nonbeliever, but for once I would like to be mistaken, and hope that, for you, this is not goodbye, but hasta luego.”

  No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable. —WFB

  In Losing Mum and Pup, Christopher drew on one of his earliest childhood memories, from the age of five, to chronicle a pivotal moment in his father’s adult life. Christopher was sleeping with his parents in their bed when the clanging of the telephone jolted them all awake. “A great commotion of grown-ups followed,” he wrote,

  Mum going down to make coffee, Pup hunched over the phone, speaking in grave, urgent tones. Of course, I found it all exciting and eventful and hoped it would involve—with any luck—a reprieve from school that day. “What is it?” I asked Mum. “Pup’s father has died, darling.”

  The death of William F. Buckley, Sr., weighed heavily on all ten of his children, of course, and naturally on Aloise, his wife of forty-one years and the mother of those children, but those who knew the Buckleys during the children’s formative years, in Connecticut, had always observed in Bill a singular desire to please his father and in WFB Sr. a corresponding delight in the combination of moral devoutness, intellectual rigor, and performing ability so markedly on display in his sixth child. None of the Buckley children did more than Bill to internalize, or spread, the gospel bequeathed to them by their accomplished, exacting, and sometimes forbidding father. Born in Washington, Texas, in 1881, William Frank Buckley was one of five brothers and sisters raised in tiny San Diego, Texas, ninety minutes from the Mexican border. Their Irish-Protestant father had emigrated from County Cork to Canada and then to Texas in the 1840s. While Will’s accounts of John Buckley emphasized their indigence, records show that John, a sheep farmer turned sheriff, also sold insurance and paid for Will’s education at the University of Texas. Under the influence of his mother, an Irish-Catholic whose family had emigrated from County Limerick, young Will was raised a Catholic and tutored in Latin. After completing his undergraduate and law degrees in five years, Will spent two desultory years at the General Land Office in Austin before heading south of the border in 1908 to practice law. Within a few years, he and his brothers had established the premier law firm in Mexico for oil companies, leading Will to become a speculator himself. Those were years of revolution and counterrevolution for Mexico, and for a time, affecting studied neutrality, Will navigated the political upheaval. But he often felt as buffeted by the U.S. government.

  MR. KEARFUL: Have you made a study of Mexican conditions during the time that you were in Mexico and during the last few months in this country?

  WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, SR.: Yes….To understand the Mexican situation it must be understood in the beginning that the present is more or less the normal condition of Mexico; the era of peace during the Diaz regime from 1876 to 1910 was an abnormal period in the history of that country. All revolutions in Mexico work along conventional lines and the present series of revolutions are in no material sense different from those that beset the country from 1810 to 1876; the abnormal element of the present series of revolutions is the active participation in them by the American Government.

  —Testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Mexican Affairs, Washington, D.C., December 6, 1919

  On a business trip to New Orleans in 1917, Will was introduced to Aloise Steiner, the sister of a girl he had met the previous year in Mexico City. After several days, WFB Sr. proposed; they were married on Christmas Day and moved to Mexico, where Will returned, con mucho gusto, to the intrigues of Mexican politics. He actively plotted a counterrevolution against the Obregon regime, including an abortive effort at gunrunning, and courted danger. “He’d talked Pancho Villa out of shooting a train conductor,” Christopher Buckley reported, with another occasion finding Will “kidnapped by thugs…and taken into a forest to be killed.” By 1921, when Obregon ordered Will Buckley expelled from the country, confiscating his assets and fortune, the native Texan was lucky to get out alive. The experience simultaneously reinforced Will’s Catholicism and his opposition to communism and all other revolutionary movements. He, Aloise, and their three children retreated to Great Elm: a large house on ample property in Sharon, Connecticut. There the ten Buckley children were raised, during Will’s absences, by Aloise and a rotating cast of nannies, governesses, teachers, and tutors. Ceaselessly the children shuttled between classes, activities, and lessons on the property, with Great Elm forming its own Catholic community: a privileged and mannered space, “elite and self-isolating,” whose inhabitants, driven hard by their father, came to see the world outside with some skepticism. “There was nothing complicated about Father’s theory of child-rearing,” wrote eldest daughter Aloise Buckley Heath. “He brought up his sons and daughters to be absolute
ly perfect.”

  To this end his children were, at one time or another, given professional instructions in: apologetics, art, ballroom dancing, banjo, bird-watching, building boats in bottles, calligraphy, canoeing, carpentry, cooking, driving trotting horses, French, folk-dancing, golf, guitar (Hawaiian and Spanish), harmony, herb-gardening, horsemanship, history of architecture, ice-skating, mandolin, marimba, music appreciation, organ, painting, piano, playing popular music, rumba, sailing, skiing, singing, Spanish, speech, stenography, swimming, tap-dancing, tennis, typing and woodcarving.

  “If his children ended up as captains of their college football teams (they didn’t), or editors of the school yearbook or presidents of the class (they occasionally did), it was all well and good, and he was very proud,” wrote Priscilla Buckley, an editor of National Review for four decades. “But it was far more important to William Buckley that his children be courteous, industrious and God-fearing.” John Buckley, the eldest son, described the atmosphere Will created in less benign terms: “My father played it two ways—either I am going to be alone with my wife and nobody is going to disturb me, including you children—or he would have a dinner party for forty-eight people.” When Will’s company struck oil in Venezuela, he rebuilt the fortune seized from him in Mexico and shuttled the family to different locales—France, England, Camden, South Carolina—all while maintaining his high standards for the children and an exhortative, if occasionally puckish, correspondence with them: